For Braun, a different manner of serving

Former senator hopes to help public eat better with line of organic foods

April 22, 2006|By Matthew Chayes, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — After a groundbreaking career in politics--the first black woman in the U.S. Senate and a presidential candidate in 2004--Carol Moseley Braun is trying something totally new.

Braun, who also served as ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, is introducing a new line of organic food--Ambassador Organics--that will include spices, teas and produce, though few other details are known.

"I see it as a continuing of my public service and my commitment to public service," Braun said. "If I can help people to eat healthier, if I can help Americans' diets to improve, if by my company I can help build the infrastructure that expands the availability of healthy foods, then I will have served in my retirement from electoral politics."

It is unusual for former high-level politicians to go into the consumer products business in this way, especially using a government title as a brand name. "Pioneering yet again, here she goes," Braun joked Friday. "Where no girl has gone before."

But her latest move provided grist for those who see her political career as a disappointment and Braun herself as someone with promise who proved unequal to the stature of the offices she held.

"If she were a serious politician, then it would be unusual," said Alton Miller, Braun's communications director during her 1992 Senate primary and now an associate dean at Chicago's Columbia College.

Miller likened Braun's planned new enterprise with the salad dressing popularized by actor Paul Newman. "What he does with salad dressings is what Carol Moseley Braun is doing with organic foods," Miller said. "The difference being that he's a bigger celebrity than Carol Moseley Braun, and probably more politically effective than Carol Moseley Braun ever was."

His former boss' new venture, Miller said, is "very much in keeping with her agility and opportunistic enterprise. She's taken a little bit and made a great deal out of it and never lost a smile and I've got to give her credit for that."

Braun, a former assistant U.S. attorney and assistant majority leader of the Illinois General Assembly, became a rising star in the Illinois Democratic Party when she shocked virtually everyone by winning the party's nomination for Senate in 1992, defeating Sen. Alan Dixon. She won the general election that fall.

Over the years, however, she got bogged down by allegations that she pocketed money that belonged to her mother, took a secret, unauthorized visit in August 1996 to meet with Nigeria's military dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha, and moved to a penthouse apartment at Lake Point Tower that she had to relinquish because she had improperly accepted a sweetheart rental deal. The controversies, along with complaints of legislative dithering, fueled Braun's humiliating loss after just one term.

Others view Ambassador Organics--she said someone else on her team came up with the name--as a legitimate transition from politics to business, certainly no different from the many former officeholders who trade on their government service by becoming lobbyists or consultants.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald said in America there's no second act," said Eric Adelstein, a Chicago-based media consultant who worked on Braun's Senate re-election campaign. "It's been proven over and over again to be completely wrong, and I think a former politician, someone with historical significance, going out to do something entrepreneurial is a completely American act in this day and age."

Added a former top aide, Pat Botterman, a Democratic political consultant in Illinois who worked on Braun's presidential campaign: "She's an adult. She can associate her name with any business she wants to. I think anybody who thinks it's unseemly ought to just pay attention to their own business and stay out of Carol Moseley Braun's. You got nothing nice to say about somebody, don't say anything."

Braun, who has an 80 percent controlling interest in the fledgling firm, acknowledged that her company faces a challenge in pricing products so that lower-income Americans can afford what sometimes are characterized as items for a richer clientele. She said she sees no contradiction between her previous life and her new career.

One of Braun's best friends, Springfield lobbyist Billie Paige, said, "In a serious sense, what that means is, `I'm going to be a grownup and I'm going to go into business for myself and I'm going to be successful,' and she certainly has worked at it."

At this point, Braun's enterprise is not yet at the starting gate. Ambassador Organics has a logo, along with a philosophy of encouraging environmentally conscious farming and making healthful food available to lower-income Americans.

But the company hasn't settled on precisely what it will be selling. "We haven't gotten that far," Braun said. "That will be part of the product launch" set for September.

Nor has she settled on exactly which grocery and health food stores will sell the products. "We have not concluded contractual arrangements with them," she said.

Still, Braun, who proudly notes that her ancestors grew pecan trees in Alabama, plans to formally introduce the new brand at the All Things Organic conference and trade show in Chicago May 6-9 at McCormick Place.